American - Director | July 29, 1953 -
The flame is not out, but it is flickering.
Ken Burns
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The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.
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I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War.
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Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.
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I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear - it's active disengagement.
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Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.
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I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content.
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History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.
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You know, you meet some people, and do a lot of interviews, and you come across a Buck O'Neill and you know you are going to know him for the rest of your life. The same thing happened with Curt Flood.
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You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.
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Like a layer on a pearl, you can't specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl.
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I have made all my films for my children with the exception of my first film because my oldest daughter wasn't born when I was making the film about the Brooklyn Bridge.
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